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I went, as is my wont, to the Preston market on Saturday, to stock up on meat, to freeze in sensible portions in separate plastic Glad-Wrap bags, for barbecuing in the near future. I got two kilograms of barbecue sausages and three kilograms of chump lamb chops…

Well, I almost lost the chops. After I told one butcher that I wanted a couple of kilograms of the chump chops he went to grab a plastic bag to put them in. Meanwhile, another customer told another butcher at the stall that he wanted the whole tray that was on display. That butcher grabbed the tray, my butcher returned, and I was in the kind of situation where you’re supposed to assert yourself, and say: ‘They’re my chops. I was here first.’ But the other guy was much bigger than me, so I just tried to look sad…

The other guy got the tray, but the butcher said to me: ‘Wait. I’ll get you some more’, and toddled off. I was upset because I wanted those chops: I’d seen them, I’d compared them to all the other chops on offer, and they were the best I’d seen for sale at the more than a dozen different butchers offering lamb chops at the market.

It all ended happily: the butcher went off and cut me three kilograms of chump which looked as fine as the ones I’d seen and only charged me twenty bucks for them, the going price for the two kilograms I’d wanted. But while I was waiting for him to come back I looked for something for lunch the next day.

Kate and I had been a bit short of money recently, so the other week I had bought two aged eye fillet steaks to have for lunch. An eye fillet is only a small cut, but it’s very flavourful, and with some steamed vegetables makes for a decent meal. An eye fillet steak is a budget-minded treat: a really good bit of beef for only a couple of bucks (if you know where to shop, of course).

There was a couple of very nice looking eye fillets on the tray. Normally I wouldn’t make a big deal of it, but since I was being stuffed around a bit, I got the butcher to pull the tray out from behind the counter and I pointed out the two steaks I wanted.

I chose them because they had consistent marbling and were both quite similar in size and colour, with no thick streaks of fat that would fail to dissolve when the meat was cooked. and no visible flaws: two perfect little treats.

We ate them the next day. We cooked them on the barbecue along with some asparagus, mushrooms. sweet potato slices and eggplant drizzled with olive oil. And they were fucking lovely: there are few things in life as pleasurable as the taste of really good beef, and each had cost less than a Big Mac.

And I remembered something Vlado told me. He said to me: ‘Beef is the Australian diamond, but too many Australians don’t appreciate it.’

I’d always thought it was a strained analogy, but then it hit me. This was exactly what Vlado was talking about: polished little Australian diamonds.

Vic Bergeron is one of my cooking heroes, up there with Len Deighton, Peter-Russell Clarke and Don Dunstan. He’s best known for inventing the Mai Tai cocktail and for his Trader Vic’s restaurants.

He was a pioneer of nouveau Polynesian cuisine and tiki culture. Frequently dismissed as a lowbrow purveyor of novelty and exotica (nowadays he’d be lauded for his fusion cooking style), he played up to the image in life and in his writings:

‘So if you’re going to be a purist and stick just to exactly the way the book says and never try anything else, why don’t you just go shoot yourself?’

His books are fun, laugh-aloud reads, aimed directly at a male audience. The Trader Vic’s Helluva Man’s Cookbook begins with a chapter on cooking meat. Later on he writes: ‘If you don’t eat vegetables, you’ll die. So you might as well cook ‘em so they taste good and then enjoy them’.

Here’s Trader Vic’s recipe for Hawaiian ham and eggs, in his own words:

Hawaiian Ham and Eggs

I’ve put this recipe into every cookbook I’ve written, I guess; it’s such a great dish! Here is the story.

My dad was an old French-Canadian and a helluva cook. On Sunday mornings before he opened his little grocery store, he’d make breakfast for us–my mom, my brother, and me. Sometimes it’d be fried bananas and pineapple with ham and eggs.

Here’s how he’d do it for each serving. He’d start with a heavy skillet and medium heat. First, he’d fry a slice of canned pineapple in a little butter, and take it out and put it on a warm platter. Then he’d split a banana lengthwise, and he’d fry that in the same pan with lots more butter. That made juice, and the pineapple had made juice. So he’d fry the banana pretty thoroughly until nicely browned, and then flip it out smoothly onto the platter. Then he’d add more butter, and fry a thick center ham slice in that and then put the ham on the platter. When he had the ham fried, there was a lot more juice in the pan, and then he’d add more butter. Then he’d put eggs in there to fry, and it was just like poaching eggs in butter and juice. Season them with salt and pepper if you need to, and put them on the platter. That’s the best ham and eggs I’ve ever tasted.

The Australian: Viewers demand chop for lamb ad

The Age: All beefs aside, meat rant spared the chop

And, a bit more clever, the Age again: Kekovich lambasting to stay on air

I got a phone call today from a producer at Media Watch about a little threatened legal action I recently received. Let’s just say that someone didn’t much care for what was written about them on the SA Culture site, and as the publisher I would be liable if it went to court.

Anyway, the matter was mostly sorted out, which is what I told the Media Watch producer. But I’d be in touch if there were any more problems.

He offered to have their lawyers look into the matter for me. He said that they were quite used to dealing with threats of defamation suits, and that he didn’t imagine I had any lawyers on hand myself. I thanked him for the offer.

I was left with a bit of a warm fuzzy feeling, really: it’s nice to know there’s someone looking out for you.

Meat and Livestock Australia are running a new, aggressive advertising campaign, claiming that not eating lamb on Australia Day 2005 would be un-Australian. You can see the ads here and you can get posters here (notice that the posters target burger and pizza shops, not kebab joints…).

I’m not sure if they’re in good taste, but BMF, the ad company handling the lamb account, have been doing some good stuff, my favourite being the ads I first saw on the wall of a butcher at the Preston Market, which said: ‘Friends don’t let friends become vegetarians’.

They’re certainly better than the weird Australian Pork ads you see around, featuring a bosomy blonde called Suzie wearing a bright pink lycra top and with tag-lines like: ‘Go on, you’d love a bit of pork’, seemingly pitched directly at the cannibal crowd.

Myself, I’d be barbecuing a few mid-loin chops on January 26, but I’m being dragged off to the countryside. Maybe I’ll pick up a kabob on the way back.

I had a physiotherapy appointment this afternoon. To get there I caught a tram down Smith Street.

A couple of young men got on the tram, tourists from the country or from an outer suburb where the trams don’t run: the experience seemed a novelty to them. Melbourne has the largest tram system in the English-speaking world (I read that somewhere), and probably the southern hemisphere as well, meaning very little. Everybody loves the trams. But the ticket system is appalling.

Both men validated their tickets by sticking them in one of the several little green ticket boxes that run the length of the tram. One of the men’s tickets didn’t come back out.

One of the other passengers was clearly a public transport worker of some kind: he had the little Yarra Trams logo on his work-shirt and he was listening to a walkie-talkie.

The guy said to him: ‘The box ate my ticket.’

The tram guy got up and looked at the box, then he started waving his arse at it. I couldn’t see quite what he was doing, but it looked like he was trying to use a key or something attached to the back of belt to open the box.

The tram, meanwhile, continued along its route. When the tram stopped at a red light I watched the tram guy walk to the front of the tram and say something to the driver. Then the lights went out and the air conditioning stopped humming. Then everything started up again. Then the ticket popped up out of the box.

The passengers who had been paying attention started laughing. The driver had restarted the entire tram to get the ticket to come out.